The Stint at 46. And doughnuts.

Good evening all,

Sorry it's been so long, but hey, I've been busy.  ON TO BUSINESS!

Things are coming together a bit at the inlaws (and the sitch that shall heretofore be called 'the stint at 46').  Today I completed the glosswork in the bedroom (skirting, doors and coving) and got another coat of blackboard paint on the cupboards in the kitchenny bit.  I also got to smash 'Bizarre Kitchen Island Unit' with a sledgehammer.  That felt pretty good.  I also painted the wall my old favorite, Chic Shadow by Dulux.  We got a lot of stuff cleared out of the room too, which helped a buttload.

Mid progress:

The grey on the walls really calms it all down a notch.

 And here we have the best shot I took of the missing kitchen Island.

I had to all the painting with a brush and not a roller because it's actually tongue and groove panelling, so that was fun.  On the plus side however, because we did a whole bunch of work there today, this is what we had for dinner:

That's right, you crazy kids.  Homemade sugar doughnuts, fresh out of the pan, smothered in sugar and cinnamon.  They were truly epic.  

So, to recap:

Cons:  Essentially homeless.  Pros:  Doughnuts for dinner.

Oh, we also had a charity bake sale at work, you know the drill.

Check it, yo.

Planning a new bathroom

Good afternoon all,

I'm in the midst of planning a bit of a bathroom update.  I recently re-did the main bathroom, but I'm after something a bit edgier.  It's currently powder pink, with white and pale pink towels, an ornate white mirror and a frosted glass medicine cabinet.  As a renter, this is pretty much the only thing I can change.  It's a pretty small room, but I want to go DARK in there.  My thoughts are near black walls and ceiling, and hot pink pops.  Think 'goth flamingo' and you're there.

Over half the bathroom is tiled in plain white square tile, so that should balance it out, and the floor is a 'lovely' black faux marble texture lino affair.

So, here is my current thought process...

I LOVE the octopus figure.  Mr E hates it.  Something tells me I'll win this one.
I'd show you a before picture, but currently the bath is absolutely filled with balloons from my birthday festivities a few days ago.  What?  That's normal, right?

EDIT:  Here are the before pictures.  Who cares that the bath is full of balloons?  I'm not normal so I shan't pretend to be.  So this is pretty much the view from the door (Why are bathrooms impossible to photograph?)

Notice the ledge above the toilet and sink.

 This wall is entirely white tile, so nothing can be changed there, although I guess a medicine cabinet could probably be screwed into the grout.  Probably.

The wall on the left there, and the reflected wall opposite show that it's a pretty, sweet pink at the mo.

I've never liked the light, but I hadn't (until now) had a better idea.  There was a horrid wire cage thing over an incandescent bulb when we moved in.  At least this was an improvement.

And here's the last wall.  That medicine cabinet is WAAAY too small, even though we don't use this as the main bathroom.  You can see the grey floor here too.

So there you have it, watch this space!

Chocolate Ruffle Cake

What day is today? It's Mickey's Birthday! What a day for a birthday, let's all have some cake!

I made a lovely ruffle cake, thanks to Pinterest (Did someone say 'addiction'?)  It's Hummingbird Bakery Brooklyn Blackout chocolate cake-my go to chocolate cake.  There's three layers of that with chocolate ganache both inside and out.  This is a chocoholics dream.

My house is in full on birthday mode today, with balloons strewn across the floor...

 And my homemade birthday chandelier.  It's just balloons, ribbons, pom poms and a homemade crepe paper fan hanging from wire.  It makes me happy.

 And of course the epic cake.  This also makes me happy.

Well, the tea party is on Saturday, and I'll be making cake pops, rice krispie treats, cupcakes, macarons for the first time, and some savoury bits and bobs.  Expect more pics! :-)

Pantone Colour of 2012: Tangerine Tango

Good Evening all,

It appears I have been snared by Pantone's colour of 2012 already.  Needing a new stovetop espresso maker I found myself in TK Maxx, and came across a tangerine coloured example.  This is what I'm talking about...

 I usually try to avoid anything this trendy, but as with all areas of my life I apply the simple principle of 'if I like it, I'll do/have/eat it'.  It's seemed to work so far.

Cupboard Shame

Good Evening all,

I've finally been shamed into sorting out the cupboard which serves as a loft in my apartment.  Now, it's important that you know that I am married to a hoarder, and we pulled about 8 boxes of CABLES, myriad broken laptops, access points, projectors and whatnot out of the cupboard.  In all fairness, not a great deal of the 'stuff' in there was mine, but there is a pretty hefty pile heading to charity shops tomorrow.  We also shifted 4 binbags of junk and 3 of recycling.  Yep, there was a place in our house dedicated to storing out of date pizza menus...

Without further ado, I present some pretty shameful before pictures...

It was, as I believe the kids say, a hot mess.

So, after about 8 hours and a trip to the local Staples, it started to look a bit more like this...

Finally, once everything was out and I could hoover, we had the fun of fitting it all back in.  I'd been 'editing' as it all came out, so I was faced with a  MUCH reduced amount of stuff to cram back in.  There were a few 'Tetris' moments, but on the whole it is SO much better!

Hurrah!

Dining Room!

Good Afternoon!

After another weekend with the paintbrushes it seems that the dining room is finally in a sharable state.  I'm still not sure about the yellow, but the Mr loves it.  The grey does soften it a bit (yes, it's the same grey as the lounge and the bedroom).  Anyway, enough of the talking, let's get on to the pictures...

We have the light fixture hanging over the dining room table.  As we live in a rental place, we couldn't be moving the light fixtures, so we rewired the ceiling rose with a nice long bit of flex, and added a hook to the ceiling above the table.  Voila!

All in all, the room feels a little more livable now, but ut's an awkward shape and still doesn't feel quite 'right'.  Watch this space, I suppose!

Chocolate Ombre Cake!

Hello everyone!

I've had so much going on lately!  We've repainted our hall, stairs and landing, but this is still only half a job as we have two sets of stairs and have left the biggest wall white.  Here's an idea of the progress we've made...

It's really difficult to photograph as when the doors are closed, the only light comes from a skylight above the stairs.  Hopefully I'll have got the hang of it by the time the painting's done...

Onto the subject of the post then...Chocolate Ombre cake!  I've been feeding my cake addiction (No pun intende...OK. Pun intended) on Pinterest when I started coming across the pink swirly ombre cake, from glorioustreats.blogspot.com.  I am a chocoholic and started looking for a chocolate version.  Unable to find one, I made my very own...

On the inside I used two cake recipes-Lady Mary Berry's All-In-One sponge,  and the Brooklyn Blackout cake recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook.  I made one layer of chocolate cake, one layer of vanilla sponge, and two mixed layers so that the ombre effect continues inside the cake.

I baked the cakes and then used vanilla butter icing to sandwich and crumb coat the layers.

From there I mixed up the butter icing (some chocolate and vanilla, again from the hummingbird cookbook) and mixed some together to get graduating shades.  Then I filled up my piping bag and attached an open star nozzle and had at the cake with swirls!

Hooray for cake!  All ready for my dad's birthday party tomorrow...

Finally Finished Bedroom

Good Afternoon.

It's a Bank Holiday Weekend here in Blighty, and according to some ancient law, one MUST do some kind of DIY.  We chose to paint, and finish the much neglected bedroom.  We'd fallen into a trap with the bedroom-the 'no-one will see it but us' trap which meant that other, more public rooms got all the attention, whilst we woke up every morning in a white, bland, hand-me-down furniture and uni house bed kinda way.  Cue obligatory before shot.  Note the dark gray wall (Which I liked for ages, BTW), the country pine bedsides and the bubble glass lamps.  Nice.

So, you saw what we did with our bed, which was to build up the headboard and upholster the whole thing in lovely grey felted wool.  That was a good start.  Then we picked up some really nice bedside tables (Actually they were 'coffee tables' but I don't think anyone minds...).  We also found some old Anglepoise model 90 lamps.  We couldn't find matching ones, so I have a white one and the Mr has the black one.  One day we might buy another one so that they match, but these were free :-).

The Bank Holiday Weekend Paintjob saw us covering over that dark grey wall (and indeed all of the other walls) with Dulux Once in Chic Shadow.  Yes.  This is the same colour as the living room.  I think it's my favorite paint colour now.  The door frames now look nicer, the baseboards look nicer, hell even our furniture looks nicer.  We even managed to put up and old mirror that we got in a charity shop for £3.00.  It  always looked awful against the white, but somehow it just works against the grey.

OK, OK...Here's a pic of the AWFUL chevrons I painted in the wardrobe.  We're going to sand them down, paint over in grey and start again.  Any ideas how I can get them neater?

All in all, the bedroom is so much calmer now.  It was much nicer to wake up this morning :-).  Eventually I's like to swap out the Eames (It's actually one of the dining chairs and needs to go back...) for a Bertoilla Diamond Chair (or something similar...), with a yellow chevron cushion perched on top.  Sigh.

There is no rest for the wicked though, as tomorrow we're planning to paint the hall starts and landing (An onerous task as we have a wall nearly 5 meters tall) in a gorgeous shade of olive green-grey.

Of Country Parks and Crumbles...

Hello there, I've decided to integrate some of my exploits and baking into this blog, and create a well rounded picture of my life :-).  Today we took a trip to Manor Farm Country Park where I saw piglets and lambs and chickens, and even milked a cow.  I went through a victorian school lesson and hand fed a turkey.  We walked for miles, and on the way back to the car we pilfered blackberries from the hedges.

Once home, I decided that a tasty blackberry and apple crumble was in order.  Alas, I wasn't using scrumped apples-I've given up that habit after the Mr. discovered and honest-to-goodness caterpillar in his lunchtime apple...

There's all sorts going on at the moment too!  I painted the en suite bathroom lemon and added lemon and grey chevrons to the inside of the wardrobe (but it kind of sucked).  We're planning on repainting the hall stairs and landing green-grey, the bedroom the same dove grey as the lounge, and adding a touch of grey to the dining room-as well as get a new desk out there!  Busy busy!

See you next time (I may be brave enough to share my rubbish chevrons yet...)